Chattanooga to get another $150,000 in grant money for projects that use the gig

Joyce Perdue, Hixson High School's curriculum coach, explains the Mozilla grant-winning project, Wireless Earth Watchdogs. It was a joint effort of science students at the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences and Hixson High School to build a real-time water quality monitoring network with sensors in North Chickamauga Creek behind Hixson High.
Joyce Perdue, Hixson High School's curriculum coach, explains the Mozilla grant-winning project, Wireless Earth Watchdogs. It was a joint effort of science students at the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences and Hixson High School to build a real-time water quality monitoring network with sensors in North Chickamauga Creek behind Hixson High.
photo Joyce Perdue, Hixson High School's curriculum coach, explains the Mozilla grant-winning project, Wireless Earth Watchdogs. It was a joint effort of science students at the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences and Hixson High School to build a real-time water quality monitoring network with sensors in North Chickamauga Creek behind Hixson High.

Lindsey Frost helped give out $150,000 worth of grants last year in Chattanooga to people who came up with projects to take advantage of EPB's super-fast gigabit-per-second Internet.

Among the grant winners were two University of Tennessee at Chattanooga computer science seniors who developed Viditor, a collaborative online video editor.

"Think Google Docs for video," Frost said. "One of those students is now working for Amazon in Seattle."

Frost will have another $150,000 to grant this year, since the National Science Foundation announced this week at the White House it would give a $3.2 million grant to help the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the Firefox Internet browser, expand the nonprofit's "Hive" work in Chattanooga, Kansas City, and three yet-to-be-named cities.

Mozilla Hives are learning networks composed of educational, nonprofit, civic and cultural institutions. Frost works full-time for Mozilla as the "community catalyst" for Hive Chattanooga, and was at the White House for the announcement.

While Chattanooga is at the forefront of super-fast Internet, the "gig" is spreading. And Mozilla wants people to be ready for it, Frost said.

"This really is the future of the web," she said. "Mozilla is deeply committed to the idea of universal web literacy."

Last year, about 80 proposals were made to Hive Chattanooga, Frost said, and a panel chose eight winners to share the $150,000.

Another winning project was Wireless Earth Watchdogs, a joint effort of science students at the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences and Hixson High School, who built a real-time water quality monitoring network with sensors in North Chickamauga Creek behind Hixson High. The system helps UTC professors, who have been monitoring the watershed, receive continuous data, Frost said.

"It doesn't require a gig, but the gig certainly makes it easier," she said.

Another winner was Adagio, a cloud-based remote audio mixing tool that, according to Hive Chattanooga, was the brainchild of Gig City Production's Jonathan Susman. It was co-developed with UTC Computer Science Professor Craig Tannis and several of Tannis' graduate students.

The National Science Foundation also announced Monday that it would spend $6 million to expand to 15 cities an even-faster Internet connection, the Global Environment for Network Innovation, or "GENI Rack." It's a nationwide network that's 10 to 100 times faster than Chattanooga's gig and is connected to 60 research universities.

UTC got a GENI Rack in January, which provided a 10-gigabit connection to Atlanta. Chattanooga's gig network helped bring the GENI Rack here.

"[Chattanooga] is the first place where GENI left the campus of the research universities and went out in the community," Andrew Rodgers, the Technologist-in-Residence at The Enterprise Center in Chattanooga, told the Chattanooga Technology Council Wednesday.

Contact staff writer Tim Omarzu at tomarzu@timesfreepress.com or www.facebook.com/MeetsForBusiness or twitter.com/meetforbusiness or 423-757-6651.

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